Between public and private
PERSONNEL policies have focused on recruitment, training, tenure, and eventually retirement. In advanced industrial societies there has been an increasing awareness of the importance of conceiving of public service careers in a much more flexible and adoptive fashion. In these countries there has emerged the phenomenon of men who do not have political appointments, but who are professionally skilled, serve in the government for a while, move out, and then return again.
The basic problem in developing countries is lack of enough alternative structures of power in the society. Power of a modern bureaucracy is heightened by having within the society adequate and other groups and institutions at a level of comparable specialisation/modernisation and shortage of skilled personnel.
For rapid development there must be elevation of power and knowledge among all possible sectors of the society. This needs appropriate cooperation in building public and private centers of dynamic activity.
National planning must be conceived as diffusion of power and knowledge through out the society. Public personnel administration should, therefore, seek to reduce division between careers in government and private institutions.
Process of development involves more than state building. For a government personnel policies should, therefore, be cast in a larger context of the most effective policies for advancing the total society. Qualified people are needed not only to serve government they are also required to expand the total talent pool of the society.
If perspective for analysing the effectiveness of personal policies for society is broadened to include the total society, the whole nation can benefit from the spin-off effects of improvements in public and private bureaucracies.
When the process of state building is seen in the context of nation building the types of knowledge that will be viewed as relevant for the state to encourage its employees will be far greater than the immediate need of the government. Once government officials are trained to have more skills relevant for more activities within modernising sectors of the society the effect will be to make the government itself be perceived by the people as having greater capacity and hence authority.
Governments are concerned about getting a proper return on the investments they make in the advanced training of government officials. It is a wide practice to require government officials to pledge themselves to specific years of service in return for specialised training. From a broad perspective for national development it would seem that such commitments might neither be necessary nor entirely desirable.
When governments are subsidising training abroad it is proper that the individuals involved should be required to make commitments to return to their home country for national development. As long as commitment is to national developments the economic and social goals can be achieved and the individuals feel less imposed upon and more prepared.
Interchange is not inconsistent with building an elite and firmly structured administrative service. In a country like Bangladesh there may be hesitation in opening public bureaucracy to short-term appointments from private bureaucracies because such an approach is seen as a threat to building the more rigid structure of state necessary to give more solid form to political development. Such hesitation makes civil service an isolated but lower status institution than intended.
Power and status of public service increase greatly by induction into the government from private sector. Careers in public service can be stimulated and power of bureaucracy greatly strengthened by infusion of talent and leadership at mid- and higher ranks of noted people in the private sector.
Public bureaucracies can benefit from personnel practices in joint ventures. Cooperation in personnel matters between government bureaucracies and joint venture industries can be greatly facilitated if government itself is involved in making policies that affect specialised training.
In future government bureaucracies may increasingly be able to use talents of retired personnel from the private sector. This needs formulation of proper personnel policies. Bangladesh can no longer continue with backward-looking policies in personnel administration.
The concept of interchange between public and private bureaucracies is relatively novel. Interchange policies need safeguards against improper influences. Excessively permissive policy of interchange from private to public bureaucracies can make the government vulnerable to improper outside influences. We should be careful about too much permissiveness.
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